Outcomes

Challenges

Data growth outpaces storage

EagleView began creating 3D roofing models and reports of aerial imagery in 2008, ultimately transforming the roofing industry. By the time the company merged with Pictometry five years later, it had grown 3000 percent and its data growth had quickly outspaced its storage infrastructure.

EagleView adds tens of millions of aerial images to its already multi-petabyte image repository every year. The company’s collection of servers and systems could not keep up with this growth—causing latency and threatening the company’s ability to deliver. With continued growth expected—and with plans that included creating massive, pre-populated data sets tied to properties and events—EagleView needed a Big Data storage infrastructure that provided scalability, performance, and availability.

Our Approach

EMC Client Executive, Joe Osborne, Digital Business Lead, Josh Howell, and DM, Nathan Thomas, worked with EagleView’s Chris Pershing, CIO, Frank Giuffrida, Chief of Engineering, Dave Kinsman, VP of Engineering, and George Lax, IT Manager to determine the best solution to meet the company’s needs.

EagleView chose EMC Isilon NL-series scale-out storage and a VCE Vblock 300 series converged architecture, which included EMC XtremIO all-flash storage. Isilon houses petabytes of aerial images captured by the company and the Vblock is used for application development, testing, and production deployment.

“One of the advantages of having both vBlock and Isilon is that we can use Isilon for deep storage of our really large datasets. Yet on the vBlock we have the flexibility to run very high performance applications but also to have very tight integration with the data store on the backend.”

Outcomes

Performance enables competitive advantage

Isilon and Vblock provide EagleView with improved performance against a backdrop of explosive data growth. Even as the number of aerial flights increases and file sizes soar, latency is now a thing of the past. Faster response times mean increased customer satisfaction and competitive advantage.

Increased scalability handles data growth

With Isilon, EagleView no longer worries about handling explosive data growth. If the company needs an additional petabyte of storage, it simply buys additional nodes. Expanding Isilon is non-disruptive—simply plug in additional nodes and turn them on.

Positioned company for future growth

Vblock will enable Vollrath to continue to handle growth and position it to create new databases, data warehouses, and data lakes, which the company can mine for strategic information. As a result, the company can gain more from its existing and future data.